March 7, 2005. There seems to
be an endless supply of bunk on psychics and television
mediums. Australia's
Sunday Telegraph made its contribution this week. The article begins "More people than you might think
are psychic. Some experts put it as high as one in 12." Of course, these
experts aren't named. Boohoo! I really wanted to read more. One of the
dumber claims in the article is this one about how humans used to be
telepathic until we started speaking:

Long before humanity found out how to use words to
communicate, they did so by a kind of thought-transference, a kind of ESP.
The great shame is that as humanity developed speaking abilities, we lost
the art of using our psychic powers.

What evidence there is for this claim remains hidden in the
mists of time, I guess. Since many of our ancestors did not develop
language, you'd think some of them would have been telepathic in the past
and would still be telepathic. What evidence is there that chimps, bonobos,
orangutans, or gorillas use ESP to communicate? I must have missed that
lesson in my biology class.

The best advice given in the unsigned article is that to
develop your psychic powers you should lie down with a coin on the center of
your forehead. Concentrate on the coin and this will help you tap into the
subconscious mind. Why would you want to do this? Because the subconscious
mind is a goldmine of wisdom and power just waiting to be discovered. Where
do you think the wisdom for the Sunday Telegraph article came from?

Dean Radin, in his book The Conscious Universe (1997) gives a
detailed account of his take on the work of Roger Nelson in "field
consciousness." This work demonstrates what kind of contribution to
consciousness studies we can expect from parapsychology. According to Radin,
when groups of people focus their minds on the same thing, they may
influence "the world at large." There may be something like a "global mind"
that is spawned by the interconnections of many individual minds. What
evidence is there for such a claim? The evidence is statistical and involves
alleged anomalies.

According to Radin, "In the basic field-consciousness experiment, we
measure fluctuations in a group's attention while simultaneously measuring
fluctuations in the behavior of one or more physical systems" (1997: 161).
For example, data from random event generators (REGs) is collected for the
time just before, during, and after a "global event" like watching the
funeral of Princess Diana or Mother Teresa. The researchers then look for
fluctuations of order in the REG outputs from various sources around the
world. Chance fluctuations of order are then measured against any
fluctuations of order during these and other events where large numbers of
people might be focusing on the same thing. Then, cumulative odds against
chance for the random data collected before, during, and right after the
global events are calculated.

According to Nelson, for Diana's funeral results compounded across twelve
independent recordings at various locations in Europe and the United States
showed an anomalous effect that would occur by chance only about once in 100
repetitions of this experiment (p = 0.013), as displayed in a graph of the
deviation accumulated across all the datasets. On the other hand, eleven
datasets for Mother Teresa's funeral show little indication of an anomalous
effect, with a composite outcome indistinguishable from chance .. We
speculate that the difference derives from the nature of the global
attention, which was very different in the two cases. (The graphs below are
from Radin 1997.)

The shock and dismay over Diana's death galvanized an overwhelming
reaction that was the preeminent media topic for several days. The funeral
ceremonies occupied virtually all the major television channels and hence
the attentions of an unprecedented number of people. This focus, and the
entrainment of ideas and emotions it entailed, might be expected to produce
a widespread resonance of affect. In contrast, Mother Teresa's death was
expected, and she had lived a full and exemplary life, allowing her memory
to be honored without the profound grief and dismay that was engendered by
Princess Diana's death. These important differences in the two situations
may explain the significantly different experimental results, and also link
them with findings in psychological and sociological studies of personal
loss.

Several other experiments have been done that have resulted in similar
data, interpreted to imply some sort of group consciousness being able to
have some sort of physical effect (See Radin 1997: 161-162). My favorite is Roger Nelson's
study on "Wishing for Good Weather." Here is an excerpt from the abstract of
his article that appeared in The Journal for Scientific Exploration
Vol. 11, No. 1:

Reunion and commencement activities at Princeton University, involving
thousands of alumni, graduates, family and others, are held outdoors, and
it is often remarked that they are almost always blessed with good
weather. A comparison of the recorded rainfall in Princeton vs. nearby
communities shows that there is significantly less rain, less often, in
Princeton on those days with major outdoor activities.

Radin claims that finding such interesting anomalies provides support for
"ideas about deep interconnectedness espoused by physicists, theologians,
and mystics" (1997: 172). Does it? I have no idea. These researchers have
found statistical anomalies, or at least they've found statistics that are
"interesting" by some standard. But do these anomalies support a belief in
psi or global consciousness? To assume they do is to assume that information
is being transferred from minds to machines. But that is the very issue that
is being investigated. It is true that they predicted certain outcomes would
occur if their hypothesis were true. And it is true that the outcomes they
predicted did occur. However, it is not clear that these successful
experiments support their hypothesis because we have no way of knowing that
their prediction must follow from their hypothesis. How can we be sure that
if there is a field consciousness, the thoughts of many people will affect
random event generators? And if the thoughts of many people could have some
sort of unified effect that did affect REGs, how can we know a priori that
the effect would be to cause more order (as is assumed)? For all we know, if
there is a causal relationship between thoughts and REGs, it could be to
produce more disorder.

Are these so-called statistical anomalies even anomalies? These
scientists are assuming that their machines should work in accordance with
formal rules of randomness and probability. Is this assumption justified?
RedNova claims that one of Nelson's machines in Edinburgh "apparently sensed
the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Centre four hours before they
happened." And, "last December, it also appeared to forewarn of the Asian
tsunami just before the deep sea earthquake that precipitated the epic
tragedy." What does this mean? It means that a graph that represents the
output of the random numbers put out by the machine showed some sort of
deviation from the norm. "The laws of chance dictate that the generators
should churn out equal numbers of ones and zeros - which would be
represented by a nearly flat line on the graph. Any deviation from this
equal number shows up as a gently rising curve."

So, how do these machines "predict" anything? The don't. After 9/11 and
after the December 26th quake and tsunami, these scientists review their
data and find some "gently rising curve" and convince themselves that it
represents global consciousness predicting a big event.

How any sane reviewer can examine these claims and not wonder what asylum
these characters have escaped from is beyond my understanding. Why am I so
insulting? Here is what the RedNova author writes:

Cynics will quite rightly point out that there is always some global
event that could be used to 'explain' the times when the Egg machines
behaved erratically. After all, our world is full of wars, disasters and
terrorist outrages, as well as the occasional global celebration. Are the
scientists simply trying too hard to detect patterns in their raw data?

Cynics? It's cynical to point out that these folks might be
shoehorning the data? What is cynical
about it?

It used to be said by philosophers such as Descartes and Hobbes
(quoting Cicero) that can be nothing so absurd but it may be found in
the books of philosophers. Today, we can safely say that there is no idea so absurd
but that
some scientist isn't currently writing books about it and getting good
reviews
to boot.

13 Feb 2005
My two favorite lines in the [RedNova] article were: "Researchers from
Princeton - where Einstein spent much of his career - work alongside
scientists from universities in Britain, the Netherlands, Switzerland and
Germany." As if mentioning Einstein will somehow make people think this is
legitimate.

Also: "To make matters even more intriguing, Prof Bierman says that
other mainstream labs have now produced similar results but are yet to go
public." This is a classic claim: that mainstream labs have reproduced some
kind of effect but are either afraid or unwilling to come forward with the
results.

Chris Sweitzer

13 Feb 2005
Mother Teresa's life may have been "full" but it was hardly "exemplary",
although she was certainly a prime example of religious hypocrisy. The 1960s
BBC documentary "Something Beautiful For God", which was responsible for
making MT a living saint, should have set alarm bells ringing - producer
Malcolm Muggeridge gave a donation to her Calcutta hospital and she promptly
spent it on altar vessels!

No-one seems to know what MT and her order did with the vast sums of
money given to them over the next thirty years, but very little of it was
spent on the people she claimed to be helping. Patients lived and died in
filthy conditions whilst MT received state-of-the-art medical treatment,
toys donated to children were sold in local shops and MT made a host of
outrageous claims about the extent of her charitable operations (all of
which were swallowed whole by dewy-eyed Western journalists).

Similarly, I would suggest that much of the public hysteria over Di's
death was whipped up by the media. She had long since worn out her welcome
with many ordinary Brits, who regarded her as a neurotic attention seeker
with a Lady Bountiful complex. I went for a walk in a crowded city centre a
few hours after her death was announced and didn't see any signs of public
mourning - she wasn't even the sole topic of conversation (the same applied
to the day of her funeral, which I didn't watch). Many people at the factory
where I worked found the orgy of grief utterly ridiculous - "You'd think
she'd cured cancer" was one response. And for all her media-friendly "work"
with landmine victims and AIDS patients, not a penny of her £21,000,000
estate went to charity.

Julia D Atkinson

reply: The scientists with their 60 or so REGs placed around the
planet are probably not interested in whether Mother Teresa's reputation was
deserved or whether the frenzy over Princess Dianna's death or any other
event on the planet is due to media hype. They work backwards from the data
these machines spit out and look for one or more that is statistically odd
according to some arbitrary formula--no matter how many people accept it and
use it, the statistical formulae used are always arbitrary--and then
correlated it to whatever. For all they know--to borrow from
Jim Alcock--Zeus could be producing their "anomalies" just to
torment them. If they don't work backwards to
shoehorn the data to whatever, they pick
some event beforehand and then monitor all their machines and try to find
some data from one or more of those machines that looks statistically odd
and that they can correlate with whatever event they've designated.

Furthermore, since these scientists have no theory as to how this
so-called global consciousness might work, they have no guidance as to what
they ought to control for. Should they be concerned with the temperature or
moisture of the rooms that their machines are in, if they're in rooms?
Should they be concerned about waves from cell phones, radios, televisions,
the sun, and so on? They have no idea what else, besides their beloved
global consciousness, might affect their REGs. In fact, they have no
reason, as far as I can tell, for thinking something like global
consciousness is involved at all.

More bunk: Last night, ABC News
Primetime devoted an hour to Brazilian faith healer
John of God. Bob
Park had this to say about the
show:

IS "JOHN OF GOD" A HEALER OR A CHARLATAN? IS ABC NEWS NUTS?
In an hour long report last night,
Primetime Live co-anchor John Quinones traveled to a remote area of
Brazil to find out if "John of God" is really a miracle healer as his
followers claim. Wake up ABC! It's the 21st Century. In a position to help
millions of viewers understand that they live in a rational universe, ABC
has chosen instead to tell them that their sad superstitions are open
scientific questions. To give the program credibility they turned to "one of
the world's most respected surgeons,
Dr.
Mehmet Oz." Oz is no doubt a fine surgeon, but he has touch therapists
in his operating room helping patients "connect to the healing energy
everywhere."

Randi was given 19 seconds to comment on John of God's
trickery. (Randi spent more than an hour in New York being interviewed
and taped for his 19 seconds on
screen. Check out his
detailed account of the interview and his commentary on the ABC program.) Another
30 seconds was spent noting that John of God has been accused of molesting
one of his young patients and has been arrested several times for practicing
medicine without a license. John is a farmer by training and has a large
ranch outside of the town where he has his clinic. But most of the program
focused on the people flocking to this clinic in the middle of nowhere
(Abadiania) seeking a miracle. I guess "fair and balanced" journalism for
topics like faith healing means following a few people around to see if the
healing really works on them. Contrast that with a few skeptical comments
and some accusations. And bring in an open-minded physician to say that John
is either a healer or he's deluded.

Dr. Oz made one comment, however, that should have received
more attention. Even if John of God is a charlatan or deluded, some of his
patients think they've been healed, cured, or helped by him, and it would be
worthwhile to study those people to see if their faith, their drive to be
healed, and the like are of any scientific importance. Other than that, the
show was not only without merit, it was meretricious. ABC did nothing to
discredit the notion that John is invaded by spirit doctors or can cure
diseases like breast cancer by sticking a forceps up a person's nose (a
carnival trick) or allergies by making a slight incision about the
breast or numerous other ailments by scraping the eyeball (another
trick).

The final tally for the show was 1. a man's brain tumor was
smaller after he visited John of God (natural but unexplained regression and
an amazing coincidence? treatment before he came to John finally showed some
results? one of John's channeled spirits did invisible
surgery? the patient's will to live and be healed affected the tumor's
growth? or ?); 2. a lady complaining of chronic fatigue says she feels a lot
better after John slit her above one of her breasts (psychosomatic? John's
spirits cut just the right place to relieve her symptoms?
placebo effect?); 3. a man with
ALS shows no effect
(didn't have enough faith? just what you'd expect?); 4. a young actress from
South Africa with breast cancer shows no effect (same as 3); 5. a woman
paralyzed from the waist down is able to walk using rails to hold on to, but
she clearly has no use of her legs; she says she feels something is
improving, though (placebo effect? delusion? didn't have enough faith? in
any case, we don't know if she tried to walk with rails before seeing John
and, if so, what the results were), and
6. the journalist's shoulder didn't heal in 40 days as John promised but
Quinones admits he didn't follow John's advice not to have sex or eat
pepper.

Number 6 may be the most telling of all as to ABC's
seriousness in doing this program. If Quinones wasn't going to follow John's
instructions, why was this material included in the program? Did he think it
was a joke?

So, what was learned? Not much, except that millions of
desperate people will try anything and believe anything to preserve or
restore their lives to a healthy state. I think we already knew that,
though. Oz speculated that when John sticks a metal object deep up a
patient's nostril and twists it around several times, he may be contacting
the pineal gland, which may trigger some sort of response in the brain that
aids healing. I seriously doubt anyone is going to do a study on this
speculation, but I also would have doubted any physician would ever stick an
ice pick through a human being's eye socket to destroy part of the frontal
lobe. What do I know?

and clearly stated to the camera during the videotaping
session [that it] is an old carny effect that my friend Todd Robbins tells
me traces back to the jaduwallahs of India and was adopted from their
repertoire by an American performer named
Melvin Burkhardt,
first being done on this continent in 1926. It's now known as the "Blockhead
Trick," and is usually done with a heavy 4 1/2" (30d - thirty-penny) iron
nail tapped up the nose and into the back of the throat, a clear, straight,
path that seems improbable. It's performed today by easily more than 100
performers in carnivals and sideshows around the world, and John of God
simply uses it to impress his victims, though he has a far easier time of it
by using smooth nickel-plated (or stainless-steel) forceps.

I know that nobody is likely to do any follow-ups on the
desperate patients who seek a miracle from John. I know that there will be
plenty of people willing to provide testimonials
to their own and other miraculous cures. I know John doesn't keep records,
but even if he did, he and his staff are not interested in scientific
documentation. I know John doesn't charge a fee for his "services," but he
prescribes herbs to everybody he sees (about 1,500-2,000 people a week) and
his clinic sells the herbs. According to
Quinones, "the clinic does pull in something like $400,000 a year from
the sale of herbs." I know from watching the video of John at work that he
places his hands on the breasts of his female patients regardless of what
ails them.

I know the lab that did the tests on the young man with the
brain tumor is not going to suggest that maybe they made an error in doing
or reading their MRI and the doctors are not likely to suggest that they may
have made the wrong diagnosis. I predicted while watching the show that the
lady with chronic fatigue and "allergies" was going to testify she improved.
She did. How long will her elevated feeling last? Who knows. I wonder if ABC
will do a follow-up on her. It wouldn't surprise me if the good feeling
decreased over time and rather than admit that John has no healing powers,
she'll go back for another dose.

Trailing the man with ALS and the woman whose spinal cord
was crushed was unnecessarily cruel. There is no way that the placebo effect
is going to cure ALS or allow a woman to walk after 17 years in a
wheelchair. I don't care how much faith they
have, no cheery thoughts or deep hope can change these kinds of conditions.
To follow them with cameras was to imply that maybe there's a chance this
will work. Right. And pigs might fly if you pray over them long enough.

The actress/dancer from South Africa reminded me of
Pat Davis, a local
TV newswoman who chose Gerson therapy over chemotherapy for breast cancer.
Both women's mothers also had breast cancer. Davis's mother survived and
outlived her daughter. The dancer's mother died even with chemotherapy. Even
after her doctor in South Africa gave her the news that her cancer was still
active, she again refused conventional treatment and is opting for some
unspecified "alternative"...and another trip to John of God's clinic in
Brazil.

Why didn't ABC ask What are the odds that a farmer in a
remote area of Brazil who has no medical training and who sticks metal deep
into people's nostrils, causing them to bleed even if relatively painlessly,
who slits with a knife areas on the body that have no known physiological
relationship to what ails the patient and then sticks his finger in the open
wound, who claims that God does the work even though he has about 35 dead
doctors and healers to assist him by doing invisible surgery from the spirit
world, and so on....what are the odds that this guy is performing miracles?
The real story is how is it possible for millions of intelligent people
to believe in such nonsense? However, had ABC told that story, who would
have watched?

We're in the 21st century but many of our people are
possessed by superstitions that are thousands of years old. Resistance to
rationality seems to be getting stronger rather than weaker even as our
knowledge of the universe keeps expanding.

One would think that a 21st century news organization like
ABC would not want to promote and encourage superstition, especially when
the results could be lethal. Are the producers at ABC news just naive? Don't
they realize the harm they can do by encouraging people to believe in faith
healing? Did they really believe that such an unbalanced program could be in
the interest of anything except catering to the desperate, the faith-based,
and the increasingly superstitious beliefs about health care that the Dr.
Ozs of the world promote?

A completely blind British man has been shown to possess an
apparent "sixth sense" which lets him recognise emotions on people's faces,
according to British scientists.

The scientists are researchers from the University of Wales,
who, according to ABC, have published an account of the man (patient-X) with
a "sixth sense" in the journal
Nature Neuroscience. Patient X has suffered two strokes that damaged
the brain areas that process visual signals, "leaving him completely blind,"
according to ABC. His "eyes and optic nerves are intact and brain scans show
that he appears to somehow use a part of the brain not usually used for
sight to process visual signals linked to some emotions." The evidence? When
presented with angry or happy human faces, his accuracy was 59 per cent,
significantly better than what would be expected by random chance, according
to the researchers. He achieved similar results for distinguishing between
sad and happy or fearful and happy faces.

Furthermore, brain scans showed that when the man looked at
faces expressing emotion, it activated the right
amygdala.

My guess is, however, that if the scientists who did this
research used the expression "sixth sense" in their report, they did not use
it the way the headline writer used it but the way the copy writer used it.
The headline says the blind man used his sixth sense to detect
emotion; the copy says he has been shown to possess an apparent sixth
sense.

One of the researchers is Dr. Alan Pegna. He not only works
at the University of Wales but in the Department of Neurology, University
Hospital, Geneva. From what I was able to gather on the Internet, Dr. Pegna
publishes in the area of neuroscience that is concerned with vision
research. So, he undoubtedly knows that there has been other research on
vision--also with brain damaged patients--that might appear paranormal to
some people, e.g.,
blindsight.

When I read this article about the blind man seeing
emotional expressions on faces, I thought of V. S. Ramachandran's
Phantoms in the Brain. In chapter 4, "The Zombie in the Brain," he
gives an account of several cases that might seem paranormal but which can
be explained without the need to invoke the magical to explain the
miraculous thing that is human vision. When he was a student, he says, he
was "taught that messages from my eyeballs go through the optic nerve to the
visual cortex at the back of my brain (to an area called the primary visual
cortex) and that this is where seeing takes place" (Ramachandran 70). Now,
he says there "are an estimated thirty distinct visual areas in the human
brain" (72).

In addition to blindsight--showing by behavior that some
sort of accurate information about the external world has been "seen" even
in the absence of visual images--Ramachandran mentions "motion blindness," a
disorder caused by "bilateral damage to ... the middle temporal (MT) area"
of the brain. Ingrid

could name shapes of objects, recognize people and read
books with no trouble. But if she looked at a person running or a car moving
on the highway, she saw a succession of static, strobelike snapshots instead
of the smooth impression of continuous motion....She said that talking to
someone in person felt like talking on the phone because she couldn't see
the changing facial expressions associated with normal conversation.

Patient X, on the other hand, seems to be able to see the
changing facial expression without seeing the face, which might seem
paranormal to some people. But vision is much more complex than most people
imagine. (Oliver Sacks tells the story of an artist who had a stroke,
damaging an area of the brain known as V4, and suddenly his whole world,
including all his colorful paintings, appeared to him in shades of gray. See
his
Anthropologist on Mars.) Scientists have no clear ideas about how
most of the thirty visual areas function (Ramachandran 73). We know that the
eye is doing more than just letting in light and inverted images.

Messages from the eyeballs go through the optic nerve and
immediately bifurcate along two pathways--one phylogenetically old and a
second, new pathway that is most highly developed in primates, including
humans. Moreover, there appears to be a clear division of labor between
these two systems.

The "older" pathway goes from the eye straight down to a
structure called the superior colliculus in the brain stem, and from there
it eventually gets to higher cortical areas especially in the parietal
lobes. The "newer" pathway, on the other hand, travels from the eyes to a
cluster of cells called the lateral geniculate nucleus, which is a relay
station en route to the primary visual cortex. From there, visual
information is transmitted to the thirty or so other visual areas for
further processing. (Ramachandran 73)

What we generally call blindness involves damage to this
second pathway. Identifying the expression of emotion on faces in some
primitive way may involve the "older" pathway. However, since Patient X has
no damage to his optic nerves, his case may indicate that a particular part
of the brain (not damaged in this patient and not directly connected to
imaging) is responsible for detection of emotion. As blindsight shows, being
able to detect something using the eyes doesn't necessarily mean one is
conscious of what is detected. It is also possible that an area of the brain
near the damaged area has taken over a function that used to belong to the
damaged area. The ABC article doesn't really give us enough information to
guess at what might be going on. And I was unable to find any reference to
this case in the online search program for Nature Neuroscience.

There's more to
blindness than meets the eye. (Did I really write that?)
[thanks to Kerrie Dougherty]

December 12, 2004. A puff piece
by Olivia Lichtenstein in the Times
Online Health Alternatives section promotes Russian-born energy
healer Alla Svirinskaya. After reporting several anecdotes that show
bioenergy therapy "works", the author does manage to bring in the
obligatory skeptical comment near the end of the article--for balance, I
suppose.

Although there is no scientific proof to back up
Svirinskaya's bioenergy healing claims, she feels that, over time, [it] will
become a common adjunct to conventional medicine. The experts, however, are
split. Conrad Lichtenstein, professor of molecular biology at Queen Mary,
University of London, thinks it's all nonsense. "There's no mechanism for
it. The world is mysterious enough without having to invent magic."

Lichtenstein then quotes an M.D. who is not so skeptical of
alternative therapies. I guess if you find two experts who disagree, that
means the experts are split...at least in the world of alternative
journalism. But, lest the reader get the wrong impression from finding out
about this split in opinion among experts, Lichtenstein ends her article by
claiming that her swollen ankle went down after treatment by Dr.
Svirinskaya. (Lichtenstein had recently had surgery to repair a ruptured
Achilles tendon.) What more proof of efficacy is needed? Someone might point
out to Lichtenstein that the natural course for an ankle swollen after
surgery is for the swelling to go down. The bioenergy session may have had
nothing to do with her recovery.

I wanted to send Ms. Lichtenstein a link to
my article on
energy healing but the only e-mail address listed on her page is one for
Dr. Svirinskaya, whom the reader is advised to contact for more information
about this wonderful therapy.

As an antidote to Lichtenstein's article, one might read
"Confessions of a Former Alternative Health Journalist" by Clare Bowerman in
the latest issue (Vol. 11, No. 2, 20004) of Skeptic magazine.

December 3, 2004.
Pet psychics (PPs) are popular as
subjects for human interest stories. Today's Kalamazoo Gazette
features a story about PP Karen Kittredge. It's nice to have a job that
pleases the client (the pet owner) and for which there is absolutely no way
to verify anything the PP says.

Kittredge travels throughout Southwest Michigan making appearances at
different Pet Supplies Plus stores where she does about thirty 20-minute
readings at $35 a pop. So, don't call her stupid. In fact, she's well
educated. She has a bachelor's degree in psychology, a master's degree in
social work, a doctorate in divinity, and has completed most of her studies
for a doctorate in theology. So, why the PP gig?

She says being a PP allows her to combine her love of animals with her
desire to help people. She got interested in the job after reading a book on
the subject and having a dragonfly land on her nose, who told her to
"follow the animals, they will lead you" [to the bank?].

November 23, 2004. For those
of you who thought Celestine Prophecy- the book
was bad, cheer up. There will soon be a movie version that will be a
"rollicking adventure story" (according to author
Redfield) and "a
demonstration of evolutionarily advanced ability and the transformational
insights." Ooooh.

The
Question of God, a four-hour series on PBS, explores in accessible and
dramatic style issues that preoccupy all thinking people today: What is
happiness? How do we find meaning and purpose in our lives? How do we
reconcile conflicting claims of love and sexuality? How do we cope with the
problem of suffering and the inevitability of death? Based on a popular
Harvard course taught by Dr. Armand Nicholi, author of The Question of God,
the series illustrates the lives and insights of Sigmund Freud, a life-long
critic of religious belief, and C.S. Lewis, a celebrated Oxford don,
literary critic, and perhaps this century's most influential and popular
proponent of faith based on reason.

Sounds impressive. I watched the first 57 minutes of the
first program last night before I returned the television to its dormant
state. The Question of God was about as interesting as listening to
people talk about their personal relationship with their dental hygienist. I
guess I was hoping for something of the caliber of Steve Allen's
Meeting of Minds. Actors would play the roles of C. S. Lewis
(1898-1963) and
Freud (1856-1939). In a fair and balanced account, Lewis would be shown to be an
imbecile as Freud explained to him that his religious feelings were a
neurotic expression of his desire to have the perfect family in this vale of
tears. Father Protector and Mother Comforter come from heaven and announce
that they are here to help, Freud tells Lewis, and you invite them in
because you are a narcissistic whiner incapable of accepting the fact that
ultimately your life means nothing. What you want is someone to stick a
pacifier in your mind and suckle your anxieties away while Daddy destroys
the barbarians at the gate.

But it wasn't to be. Instead, we were treated to bits of
biography spliced between round table discussions featuring Nicholi the
psychiatrist,
a Jungian
analyst, a
filmmaker/journalist,
an
attorney, a
physician, an
author on
spirituality, Michael Shermer, and
a couple of other folks interested in telling us their thoughts on gods and
spirits. After enduring mostly inane or harmless and uninteresting
remarks for about an hour, I can understand the attraction of a Jerry
Springer show where a guest throws a chair at another guest. It is very
difficult to behave when educated, intelligent people are dribbling all over
themselves about their feelings of oneness with the universe while brushing
their teeth. I kept hoping Bill O'Reilly would show up in the guise of
Richard Dawkins and tell them all to shut up before launching into a
diatribe on what these god and goddess concepts have cost our species.

If you want to listen to adults ask the Great Rhetorical
Questions--What is True? What is Real?--while other adults politely listen
to them and awkwardly try to put in a good word for science, objectivity,
and living in the real world--then tune in for the rest of the
programs. Of course, this is just my experience and it may be true and real
for me but not for you.

On the other hand, I may be biased because I recently
finished discussing with my introduction to philosophy class an article by
Lewis on what he called the "humanitarian" theory of punishment. In his
essay, Lewis raises the scary possibility that the Freudians will take over
society and declare religion a disease and make it a crime. This follows
logically, he argues, from the fact that Freudians consider religion a
neurosis and some people think that criminals are really sick and in need of
treatment not punishment. What? You don't see the logical equivalence of
"all crimes are diseases" and "all diseases are crimes"? Shame on you.
Surely you see how one belief inevitably leads to the other. Lewis did. Of
course, there's more than one kind of truth and what is reality anyway?

If you want to listen to some interesting discussions about
social and philosophical issues involving the mind, may I suggest The Infinite Mind.